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Resume-based hiring is dehumanising and terrible under any aspect. There is nothing redeeming about it.

There is an incredible number of factors that determine how good a prospective employee is to a company, and none of them can be easily represented with a list of job titles and qualifications. You can find people with impressive resumes and they are terrible employees: lazy, stupid, unmotivated. There is a vast amount of people with unimpressed job history that would be perfect candidates even to work on a very specific piece of technology if they are smart, quick to learn, driven, ambitious, enthusiastic or any other soft-skill.

My best interview is my first, as a 19 year old high school dropout: I must've mentioned that I had played with Linux and knew C and PHP. They asked me something along the lines of "what does ifconfig do?", "can you configure Apache?" and "tell me a little about your projects in C", and got hired. They only needed to know I was able to learn undirected, was passionate about computers in general. Of course this was for a junior position, but still, none of that 3 interviews, whiteboard leetcode bullcrap that is so common nowadays.

tl;dr: Candidates are to their resumes what a chef's meal is to the list of ingredients.




> Candidates are to their resumes what a chef's meal is to the list of ingredients.

It sounds as though you're saying it's not the list of ingredients, it's what you make of them.

On the contrary, the interesting chefs, you can tell from the list, as there are delightfully unexpected choices and twists on the list.

This absolutely POPS on a resume, and is one of the indicators I look for.


Can you tell me how good my chilli con carne is going to taste? These are the ingredients I use: ground beef, tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, red beans, and of course, chilli.


Subpar to average. There is a significant lack of spices in that list.


See, no secret ingredient.


I actually got a secret ingredient: adding a square of dark chocolate to the sauce. And I don't think my chilli is anything special, while a better cook can make a great one with the exact same list of ingredients.

Point is, resumes are overrated.




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